Bankruptcy as Implicit Health Insurance

Transcription

1 Bankruptcy as Implicit Health Insurance Neale Mahoney December 30, 2010 JOB MARKET PAPER Abstract This paper examines the interaction between health insurance and the implicit insurance that people have because they can file (or threaten to file) for bankruptcy. With a simple model that captures key institutional features, I demonstrate that the financial risk from medical shocks is capped by the assets that could be seized in bankruptcy. For households with modest seizable assets, this implicit bankruptcy insurance can crowd out conventional health insurance. I test these predictions using variation in the state laws that specify the type and level of assets that can be seized in bankruptcy. Because of the differing laws, people who have the same assets and receive the same medical care face different losses in bankruptcy. Exploiting the variation in seizable assets that is orthogonal to wealth and other household characteristics, I show that households with fewer seizable assets are more likely to be uninsured. This finding is consistent with another: uninsured households with fewer seizable assets end up making lower out-of-pocket medical payments. The estimates suggest that if the laws of the least debtor-friendly state of Delaware were applied nationally, 16.3 percent of the uninsured would buy health insurance. Achieving the same increase in coverage would require a premium subsidy of approximately 44.0 percent. To shed light on puzzles in the literature and examine policy counterfactuals, I calibrate a utility-based, micro-simulation model of insurance choice. Among other things, simulations show that bankruptcy insurance explains the low take-up of high-deductible health insurance. I thank my advisers Liran Einav, Caroline Hoxby, and Jonathan Levin for their guidance and support. I am grateful to Didem Bernard and Ray Kuntz at AHRQ for their help with the restricted access MEPS data, Richard Hynes for sharing data on asset exemptions, and Amanda Kowalski for sharing insurance market regulation data. I thank Ran Abramitzky, Jay Bhattacharya, Tim Bresnahan, Marika Cabral, Amy Finkelstein, Seema Jayachandran, Jakub Kastl, Ryan Lampe, Luigi Pistaferri, Luke Stein, Isabelle Sin, Alessandra Voena, Gui Woolston, and numerous seminar participants for valuable comments. Financial support in the form of a Kapnick Fellowship, Ric Weiland Fellowship, and Shultz Fellowship is gratefully acknowledged. All errors are my own. Department of Economics, Stanford University.

2 1 Introduction There is a large literature in economics evaluating the effects of government policy on health insurance coverage in the United States. 1 The question of why households choose to be uninsured is less well understood. 2 To better understand the insurance coverage decision, this paper examines a mechanism that has received little attention: implicit insurance from the threat-point of personal bankruptcy. The implicit insurance from bankruptcy arises from the confluence of three factors. First, due to federal law, hospitals are required to provide emergency treatment on credit and typically provide non-emergency care without any upfront payment as well. Second, under Chapter 7 of the U.S. bankruptcy code, households can discharge medical debt, giving up assets above asset exemption limits in return. 3 Third, because of the deadweight cost of the bankruptcy process, households and creditors have an incentive to negotiate payments without a formal bankruptcy filing. Bankruptcy, as a result, provides households with a form of high-deductible health insurance. Households are exposed to the financial risk from medical shocks up to the level of assets that can be seized in bankruptcy and insured against financial risk above this level. Summary data on the uninsured suggest that this mechanism could be important. Figure 1 shows that uninsured households have vastly fewer seizable assets than households with private insurance. Sixty-three percent of the uninsured would give up less than $5,000 in a bankruptcy filing, compared to only 28 percent of the privately insured. Figure 2 shows that payments by the uninsured are substantially lower when receiving a high volume of medical care. While payments by the privately insured scale up proportionally with medical charges, payments by the uninsured are capped on average at just over $5,000. To more rigorously examine the mechanism, I construct a simple model of bankruptcy, medical billing, and insurance choice. The model predicts that, conditional on wealth, out-of-pocket 1 See Gruber and Simon (2008) for review of the take-up and crowd-out effects of public insurance expansions. See Gruber (2005) for a review of the impact of tax subsidies on the employer provision of insurance. See Liu and Chollet (2006) for a review of the effects of tax policy on insurance take-up in the non-group market. 2 In a review of the literature Gruber (2008) concludes, there are a variety of hypotheses for why so many individuals are uninsured, but no clear sense that this set of explanations can account for the 47 million individuals. 3 The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) of 2005 was implemented after the period I analyze. It prevents households with more than the state median income from filing under Chapter 7 in most circumstances. The households most affected by the reform are unlikely to be marginal to the mechanism I analyze. 1

3 medical payments should be decreasing in the level of seizable assets for a given volume of medical care received. Holding wealth constant, households with fewer seizable assets should be less likely to purchase conventional coverage. I test these predictions using variation in the state-level asset exemption laws that specify the type and level of assets that can be seized in bankruptcy and detailed asset data from the restricted access Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID). The degree of cross-state variation in the asset exemption laws in substantial. Kansas, for example, allows households to exempt an unlimited amount of home equity and up to $40,000 in vehicle equity. Neighboring Nebraska allows households to keep no more than $12,500 in home equity or a $5,000 wildcard of any type of asset. Both states allow households to keep retirement assets. I construct a simulated instrument that isolates the variation in seizable assets solely due to these laws, mechanically purging variation due to wealth and other household characteristics. Using this source of variation and cost data from the MEPS, I find that uninsured households with fewer seizable assets make lower out-of-pocket payments for a given level of medical care received. My preferred estimate indicates that a log point drop in seizable assets reduces out-ofpocket payments by 37 percent. Consistent with the high-deductible nature of this insurance, the drop is larger for households that utilize more medical services as the deductible of this implicit insurance is more likely to bind. Using the same source of variation and MEPS and PSID data, I find that households with fewer seizable assets are less likely to have insurance. The estimates suggest that if the bankruptcy laws of the least debtor-friendly state of Delaware were applied nationally, 16.3 percent of the uninsured would buy health insurance. With a take-up semi-elasticity of from the literature, achieving the same increase in take-up would require a premium subsidy of 44.0 percent. 4 I use three strategies to address the concern that asset exemption laws may be correlated with unobserved state-level factors. The first strategy is to use variation due to 1920 homestead exemptions as an instrument. By using homestead exemptions from before the era of widespread health insurance, the instrument alleviates potential bias from factors that might have simultaneously caused changes in asset exemption law and the dependent variables over the course of 4 The estimates is taken from Congressional Budget Office (2005) and is based on premium variation due to state-level community rating and premium compression regulations. As I discuss below, this estimate is in the center of the range in the literature. 2

4 the twentieth century. Moreover, historical evidence (e.g., Goodman, 1993) showing that 1920 homestead exemption levels resulted from an idiosyncratic array of nineteenth century historical circumstances diminishes the concern that this variable merely proxies for a persistent state characteristic (such as the strength of a pro-debtor political movement). The second strategy is to sequentially add fixed effects for Census Regions (e.g., Northeast) and Census Divisions (e.g., New England) to the main specification. If a spatially correlated unobserved factor is driving the findings, the results should change with the inclusion of these covariates. Stable estimates across these specifications mitigate this concern. The third strategy is to add controls for a rich set of potentially relevant legislative factors. The fact that the estimates are uncharged by the inclusion of these covariates provides further support for the case that the identifying variation is uncorrelated with unobserved state-level determinants of costs and coverage. I take the analysis a step further by calibrating a utility-based, micro-simulation model of insurance choice. The model is based on a nationally representative sample of households. Households face household-specific medical shock distributions that depend on the age and sex of each household member. To maximize their expected utility over wealth, households choose to either purchase conventional insurance at market premiums or rely on the high-deductible insurance from bankruptcy. I use this model to shed light on puzzles in the health policy literature. One of the puzzles I examine is the low take-up of high-deductible health plans (HDHP) by the uninsured (Fronstin and Collins, 2008). Proponents of these plans have argued that by offering lower premiums, HDHPs would expand coverage among the uninsured. But because the implicit insurance from bankruptcy often resembles a high-deductible policy, HDHPs are relatively more likely to be crowded out by this mechanism. In the micro-simulation model, accounting for bankruptcy reduces the percentage of uninsured households projected to purchase a $1,000 deductible plan by 13 percentage points. For a $5,000 deductible plan, bankruptcy reduces demand by 37 percentage points, or from 43 to 6 percent. A second puzzle I examine is heterogeneity in the demand for coverage. Without bankruptcy, households with and without insurance coverage are difficult to separate. Using variation in medical risk, tax exemptions, and administrative costs, the model can separate the predicted coverage levels of uninsured and insured households by only 14 percentage points. Because there are large 3

5 differences in seizable assets across these groups, accounting for bankruptcy has a substantial incremental effect, widening the gap in predicted coverage from 14 to 51 percentage points. The mechanism I study may be relevant to policy design. On the one hand, the implicit insurance from bankruptcy has obvious inefficiencies. Uninsured households receive a substantial amount of non-emergency medical care in emergency rooms, which are obviously not optimized for this purpose (Delgado et al., 2010). At the same time, these households receive less preventative care than they would with conventional health insurance (Institute of Medicine, 2002). There are deadweight costs to negotiation and collections under the threat-point of bankruptcy. And the fact that uninsured households are not exposed to the social cost of this implicit insurance means that too many households choose to be uninsured. Yet conventional health insurance has inefficiencies of its own. A particularly interesting inefficiency relative to bankruptcy insurance is moral hazard. With conventional insurance, medical providers and patients often have incentives to supply and demand excess medical care. Under the implicit insurance from bankruptcy, however, physicians are more likely to be exposed to the social cost of their decisions and patients have little leverage to demand excess treatment. The result is that bankruptcy may be a lower moral hazard form of social insurance. 5 While a comprehensive analysis of the costs and benefits of bankruptcy is overly ambitious, I can examine one key tension between these forms of insurance with the micro-simulation model. In particular, the model allows me to trade off the benefit of bankruptcy as a lower moral hazard form of insurance against the inefficiency due to households not facing the full social cost from being uninsured. This tradeoff suggests a corrective system of Pigovian penalties that expose households to the full social cost of the implicit insurance they receive. 6 With the optimal penalty of $218 per person on average, about 7 percent of the uninsured take up coverage and aggregate surplus increases by a small $4 to $5 per person. Analyzed in this framework, the penalties under the Patient Projection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), which average $418 per person, are too large, decreasing aggregate surplus by $9 to $13 per person on average. By effectively eliminating the low moral hazard option, the counterfactual of making 5 Estimates of the moral hazard effects from conventional health insurance, when identified off large medical costs, are incremental to any moral hazard effects from the implicit insurance from bankruptcy. 6 For this exercise, I assume that uninsured households are not already subsidized through the tax code or some other channel. 4

6 medical debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy reduces surplus by an average of $36 to $43 per person. While the exact welfare numbers should be viewed with some caution, the exercise suggests that dramatically reducing bankruptcy insurance while having the superficial benefit of increasing conventional coverage may not be socially desirable. By studying the interaction between implicit and conventional insurance, this paper is closely related to the literature on long-term care insurance and the implicit insurance from spending down assets and qualifying for Medicare, such as Brown and Finkelstein (2008). Like them, I find that implicit insurance can cause substantial crowd-out. It is more generally related to a literature in macroeconomics that assesses the equilibrium effects of bankruptcy as a form of consumption insurance against a range of different shocks, including those related to earnings, divorce, childbearing, lawsuits, and medical bills (Livshits, MacGee and Tertilt, 2007; Chatterjee et al., 2007). By examining unpaid care, this paper is also related to Herring (2004) and Rask and Rask (2000), who find a negative association between measures of charity care and insurance coverage. And this paper shares similarities with a literature that examines the effect of medical debt on bankruptcy filings (e.g., Himmelstein et al., 2005; Dranove and Millenson, 2006; Gross and Notowidigdo, 2009), although unlike these papers, I treat bankruptcy as threat-point, not a dependent variable to be explained. In this, my approach more closely resembles the informal bankruptcy viewpoint advanced by Dawsey and Ausubel (2004), who show that credit card debt is charged off without a bankruptcy filing in the majority of cases. The rest of the paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 presents the institutional background and a simple model. Section 3 provides an overview of the data. Sections 4 discusses the identification strategy. The main empirical results are presented in Sections 5 and 6. The micro-simulation model is presented in Section 7. Section 8 discusses puzzles in the literature and policy implications. Section 9 concludes. 2 Bankruptcy as a Form of High-Deductible Health Insurance 2.1 Institutional Background The implicit insurance from bankruptcy arises from the combination of three institutional features: the fact that most medical care is provided on credit even when repayment is unlikely, the ability 5

7 of households to discharge this debt in bankruptcy, and the incentive for households and creditors to come to a negotiated solution to avoid the deadweight loss from a formal bankruptcy filing. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires that hospitals treat patients with emergency medical conditions, and prohibits them from delaying treatment to inquire about insurance status or means of payment. 7 As a matter of practice, most hospitals provide non-emergency medical care on credit as well. Hospitals generally lack the infrastructure to bill patients at the point of service (LeCuyer and Singhal, 2007) and rarely deny service when repayment is unlikely. 8 Having received medical care on credit, bankruptcy law allows households to write off this debt in exchange for assets or future earnings. Chapter 7 is the most popular form of personal bankruptcy, accounting for about 70 percent of all filings (White, 2007). Under Chapter 7, households can discharge most unsecured debt such as credit card debt, installment loans, and medical bills. In return, creditors can seize assets above exemption levels that vary by asset type and state of residence. Chapter 13 is the other bankruptcy option. Under Chapter 13, households discharge most unsecured debt in exchange for payments out of disposable income over the following 3 to 5 years. By statute, these payments must be of at least the value that creditors would receive in Chapter 7. They are rarely larger because, in the period I study, all households have the option to file for Chapter 7. 9 Following Fay, Hurst and White (2002), I use seizable assets under Chapter 7 to characterize payments under both chapters of the bankruptcy code. Households, however, do not have to formally declare bankruptcy to receive the implicit insurance it provides. Under the threat-point of bankruptcy, households and medical providers often resolve payments without an actual bankruptcy filing. There are multiple junctures where this occurs. Discounts on the list price of treatment known as charity care are offered at the 7 U.S.C dd. 8 In a survey of nonprofit hospitals, 90 percent reported never denying any medical services to patients with no insurance (IRS, 2007). For-profit hospitals seem to operate similarly. For example, Duggan (2000) rejects the hypothesis that for-profit hospitals have a lower preference for charity care. Delgado et al. (2010) find that the majority of emergency departments offer preventative care to uninsured patients. 9 The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), effective in October 2005, established a means test for Chapter 7. It restricted households earning more than the state median income from filing under Chapter 7 in most circumstances. The households most effected by the reform are unlikely to be marginal to the mechanism I analyze. 6

8 point of service to the obviously indigent. 10 After treatment, many hospitals encourage financially strapped households to negotiate discounts, requiring the submission of information on income and assets (e.g., W-2s and mortgage payments) as part of their charity care applications. 11 Even when charity care is not provided, the lion s share of medical debt is charged off in the collection process. Despite contracting with debt collection agencies, providers recover only about 10 to 20 percent of bills submitted to the uninsured (LeCuyer and Singhal, 2007). Overall, bad debt from the uninsured was estimated at about $16 to $18 billion in 2004 (LeCuyer and Singhal, 2007). While the exact proportion of debt discharged without a bankruptcy filing is unknown, Himmelstein et al. (2009) find that the ratio of medical to non-medical bankruptcies, according to their definition, is the same for households with and without insurance coverage, suggesting that a large portion of the uninsured s medical debt is charged off outside of formal bankruptcy. This is not unique to medical debt. Dawsey and Ausubel (2004) report that the majority of credit card debt is charged off in what they call informal bankruptcy. 2.2 A Model of Bankruptcy as High-Deductible Health Insurance To bring together these institutional features, I build a stylized model of households, medical providers, and bankruptcy. Households have a representative agent with expected utility preferences over wealth w = w E + w S, composed of exempt assets w E (net wealth that cannot be seized in a bankruptcy filling) and seizable assets w S (net wealth that can be seized by creditors). 12 They face medical shocks with list price m drawn from distribution M and choose whether to purchase health insurance to protect against this financial risk. Medical providers are obligated to provide medical services m and then attempt to recover the costs. 13 In doing so they face the difficulty of having imperfect information on household wealth. I assume that the information they have which can be anything from basic demographics to detailed asset values reported in charity care applications can be summarized by a predicted 10 Federal and state laws also influence charity care provision. Nonprofits use charity care to meet their Community Benefit requirement. Some states subsidize care to the indigent through unpaid care pools. I account for these factors in the empirical analysis. 11 When this information is not provided, hospitals run credit checks on indebted patients, filing suit if they find evidence of a mortgage or savings that could be claimed ( In Their Debt, Baltimore Sun, December 12, 2008 to December 24th, 2008). 12 I discuss endogenizing wealth at the end of this section. 13 Providers actually outsource many of the functions described below to debt collection companies. 7

9 level of seizable assets ŵ S. Based on this information, providers submit a bill (s) that can be no more than the medical charge (s m). In the event of an actual bankruptcy filing only a fraction θ 1 of seizable assets is recovered. 14 Model timing proceeds as follows: first, households decide whether to purchase health insurance; second, households receive medical shock m; third, medical providers submit a bill; fourth, households decide whether to declare bankruptcy. I solve the model in reverse order Household bankruptcy decision Conditional on receiving medical bill s, households can either not declare bankruptcy (yielding wealth of w E + w S s) or declare bankruptcy (yielding wealth of w E ). Maximizing wealth, households declare bankruptcy if and only if s > w S Provider billing decision Providers choose the bill to maximize max s m s Pr(s < ws ŵ S [ ) + θ EŵS w S s w S] Pr(s w S ŵ S ), (1) where the first term is the submitted bill s multiplied by the probability it does not induce bankruptcy and the second term is recovered assets multiplied by the probability of a formal bankruptcy filing. Figure 3 depicts the submitted bill s = min { m, s(ŵ S ) } that maximizes this objective. Moving along the x-axis, the bill increases one-for-one with list price m. It is capped at the value s(ŵ S ) where the marginal probability of a dollar in increased payments equals the marginal cost in lost assets from pushing a household into formal bankruptcy. Under standard distribution assumptions on seizable assets discussed in Appendix Section A, the following intuitive result obtains: Prediction 1. Holding overall wealth constant, the optimal submitted bill s is increasing in the level of seizable assets w S. 14 The loss of wealth arises from the legal cost of filing, fees taken by the bankruptcy trustee for selling the assets, competing claims on seizable assets from other creditors, and the depreciation of assets prior to sale, among other costs. 15 Fay, Hurst and White (2002) find empirical support for this strategic model of bankruptcy in contrast to a nonstrategic model where households file due to unanticipated adverse events. 8

10 The formulation allows for formal and informal bankruptcy. If providers overestimate seizable assets, households can be pushed into formal bankruptcy. If providers underestimate seizable assets, households can settle at a discount Household insurance decision The cap on financial risk affects insurance coverage. To see this, consider a stylized health insurance contract with deductible m and no other features. Under this contract, households are exposed to medical costs up to deductible m and insured above this level. 16 Under bankruptcy, households are exposed to medical costs up to the provider cap s(ŵ S ) unless it is exceeds seizable assets w S, in which case households declare formal bankruptcy, limiting their financial risk at this level. A household s willingness to pay v for conventional insurance with deductible m is the value that equates the expected utility with conventional insurance to the expected utility with the implicit insurance from bankruptcy: ] [ ] E m [u(w v min{m, m} = E m,ŵs w S u(w min{m, s(ŵ S ), w S } (2) As this formulation makes clear, conventional and bankruptcy insurance are very similar: the only difference is that with conventional insurance the deductible is m and with bankruptcy insurance the deductible is the minimum of s(ŵ S ) and w S. Prediction 2. Holding overall wealth constant, the willingness to pay for insurance v and therefore insurance coverage is increasing in the level of seizable assets w S. Because the implicit insurance from bankruptcy is a substitute for conventional health insurance, households with more seizable assets have a higher willingness to pay for insurance and are ceteris paribus more likely to be insured. I derive the prediction in Appendix Section A. The prediction is robust to natural extensions of the model. For example, allowing insured households to receive more or better medical treatment (Doyle, 2005) increases the incentive to purchase coverage, but households with fewer seizable assets are still relatively less likely to insure. Similarly, increasing the cost of bankruptcy to account for factors such as stigma (Gross and 16 In practice, health insurers negotiate discounts off of medical charges. However, as shown in Figure 2, uninsured households seem to receive these discounts as well. Thus to account for discounts in the model, one could replace m with discounted costs with no impact on the predictions. 9

11 Souleles, 2002) or reduced future access to credit (Musto, 1999) does not affect the basic prediction. And endogenizing the level of seizable and exempt assets actually strengthens the relationship between insurance coverage and seizable assets because households that choose to forgo coverage have an additional incentive to reduce their seizable asset holdings. A more subtle point relates to the information available to households. The model assumes that households know their level of seizable assets w S and their health risk. Obviously this is an exaggeration. What matters is that households have some knowledge of the financial risk from forgoing insurance. For example, if households learn from the news-media or peers that medical providers in their community frequently seize home equity, then homeowners may be more likely to purchase coverage even if they know nothing about the mechanism. 3 Data Overview I use two main data sources to test the predictions of the model. I examine the effect of bankruptcy on medical costs using data from the 2000 to 2005 waves of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). The survey has detailed information on medical costs and insurance coverage. At the Data Center, encrypted state identifiers and newly edited asset and debt variables are also available. 17 I examine the effects on coverage using the MEPS data and the 1999 to 2005 waves of the biennial Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID). The survey has public use information on insurance coverage, assets and debts variables, and state identifiers. Because the state of residence is non-encrypted in the PSID, I use this dataset for the primary insurance coverage analysis and replicate the results in the MEPS. In both data sets, I aggregate the individual-level data to the household level and inflationadjust monetary variables to 2005 dollars using the CPI-U. I also exclude households with one or more members enrolled in public insurance or a head age 65 or older due to their eligibility for public Medicare insurance. 18 This leaves me with 34,841 observations in the MEPS and 22,844 observations in the PSID. 17 Bernard, Banthin and Encinosa (2009) find that the estimates of net worth in the MEPS are comparable to those in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). My analysis does not go back before 2000 because when I started the project only asset and debt data from the 2000 to 2005 period had been edited. 18 In the MEPS, I also drop the 3.6 percent of households with missing wealth variables. 10

12 3.1 Asset Exemptions I codify assets exemptions using Elias (2007), a do-it-yourself guide to personal bankruptcy. Table 1 shows these exemptions. Contemporaneous homestead exemptions exhibit substantial variation, ranging from zero in seven states to unlimited in eight others; vehicle exemptions range from zero in 15 states to at least $10,000 in five others; and wildcard exemptions, which can be applied to any asset, show a similar degree of variation. California residents can file under two different exemption systems, and residents of 14 states can file under the federal exemption system if they choose. The last column shows homestead exemptions in the year of 1920 from Goodman (1993) Seizable Assets Let i denote households and j denoted states. Seizable assets are a function of household assets and debts and exemptions laws, denoted by vectors w i and e j. Following the general structure of Fay, Hurst and White (2002), seizable asset can be decomposed into assets that can be seized in bankruptcy (gross seizable assets) minus any debt that can be discharged in bankruptcy (dischargeable debt) plus a cost of filing: w S (w i, e j ) = Gross_Seizable_Assets(w i, e j ) Dischargeable_Debt(w i ) + Filing_Cost. 19 States that did not exist and states that had only acre-based exemptions are denoted as missing. 11

13 Gross seizable assets are calculated as the sum of assets above the exemption level in each asset category: 20,21 { Gross_Seizable_Assets(w i, e j ) = max max { Home_Equity i Homestead_Exemption ij, 0 } + max { Vehicle_Equity i Vehicle_Exemption ij, 0 } + max { Retirement_Assets i Retirement_Exemption ij, 0 } + max { Financial_Assets i Financial_Exemption ij, 0 } + Other_Assets i Wildcard ij, 0 }}. For households with multiple options (e.g., state and federal), I calculate seizable assets under each option and assign households the most generous. Dischargeable debt is defined as non-collateralized debt excluding education loans. 22 Filing costs, which include an estimate of legal fees, are set to $2,000, as estimated by Elias (2007). Neither of these variables vary by state. Appendix Table A1 shows summary statistics for seizable assets by insurance status. Seizable assets are right skewed with a median of $34,000 and a mean of $217,000 in the baseline sample. Gross seizable assets average $221,000. Due to the large homestead exemptions in many states, seizable home equity accounts for only about a quarter of this amount. Dischargeable debt levels are small, averaging $7,000 per household. More detail on the seizable assets calculations can be found in Appendix Section B. 3.3 Medical Costs Medical costs variables are shown in Appendix Table A2. Annual medical charges, defined as the list price of medical services used that year, average $6,647 per household. Total payments, defined as the sum of payments received, are less than charges due to both discounts negotiated by 20 Calculating seizable assets by asset types ignores potential gains from reallocating wealth into asset categories with unused exemptions immediately before a bankruptcy filing. This seems appropriate as such reallocation is explicitly prohibited under bankruptcy law and judges have broad discretion to root out this type of behavior (Elias, 2007). 21 Following the law, the formulation allows the wildcard exemption to be applied both towards Other_Assets and assets in excess of the main asset categories. 22 As educational debt is not separately identified in either data set, I net out projected educational debt using estimates from the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). 12

14 insurance providers and medical care provided as charity care or bad debt. For privately insured households, total payments average $4,480 per household. Ninety-four percent of these payments are either out-of-pocket payments or payments made by private insurance providers. For the uninsured, total payments average $1,267 per household. Fifty-two percent of these payments are out-of-pocket. Miscellaneous payments, such as payments from charity care pools, worker s compensation, or automobile insurance, account for most of the rest. In the empirical analysis, I use the out-of-pocket payments variable to measure the financial risk faced by the uninsured. While this variable will accurately capture financial risk in most circumstances, it may inaccurately measure financial risk for two reasons. First, out-of-pocket payments overstate financial risk when these payments are put on a credit card that is ultimately discharged in bankruptcy. Because households with fewer seizable assets are more likely to discharge credit card debt, out-of-pocket payments may overestimate financial risk for some low seizable assets households. Second, out-of-pocket payments may understate financial risk when medical providers break up large bills into installments since households are not prompted to report payments that extend beyond the survey period. Because households with more seizable assets are more likely to make these large, multi-installment payments, out-of-pocket payments may understate financial risk for high seizable assets households. Both overstated financial risk for low seizable assets households and understated financial risk for households with high seizable assets may lead to attenuated estimates of the relationship between seizable assets and financial risk as measured by out-ofpocket payments, suggesting that the empirical estimates should be interpreted as a lower bound of the effect of bankruptcy insurance on household financial risk. I use Relative Risk Scores to control for medical utilization. As I discuss in Section 4, controlling for utilization is important because the direction of the unconditional relationship between out-of-pocket payments and seizable assets in theoretically ambiguous. To control for utilization, I use the Relative Risk Score variable constructed using the RiskSmart Version 2.2 software created by DxCG Inc. 23 This software uses information on age, sex, and medical diagnoses to project expected medical utilization based on regression models developed by the company. Because the software does not use geographical information to project utilization, the Relative Risk Score is 23 See form HC-092 on the MEPS website for a full description of the construction of this variable. 13

15 orthogonal to asset exemption laws and other state-level factors. 3.4 Insurance Premiums I conduct additional analysis using data on health insurance premiums in the individual market. In particular, I use data on premium quotes in each state that are listed on ehealthinsurance, a website that aggregates premium quotes from most of the major insurance providers. The data I use were collected in November, I collect premiums in each state for a 30-year-old nonsmoking male. Because premiums quotes are zip code specific, the data are collected for a zip code randomly selected from the 10 most populous zip codes in the state. Along with premiums, I collect data on the insurance provider, plan brand name, deductible, coinsurance rate, and copayment for a office visit. I define an insurance plan as all observations with the same insurer, brand name, deductible, coinsurance and co-payment. Table A3 shows basic summary statistics for the data. The data set covers 41 states and 1,891 plans. The mean premium is $103 per month, the mean deductible is $3,351, and the mean coinsurance rate is 15 percent. 4 Empirical Strategy In this section, I discuss the instrumental variables strategy I use to test the predictions of the model. I start by presenting the second stage coverage and cost equations and then discuss the instrument and potential threats to validity. 4.1 Coverage Equation Figure 1, discussed in the Introduction, showed a strong correlation between insurance coverage and seizable assets. To evaluate the impact of bankruptcy more rigorously, I estimate regression models of insurance coverage on seizable assets. Letting i indicate households and j indicate states, the second stage coverage regression takes the form Insured ij = α w ln(w S ij ) + X ij α X + ɛ ij, (3) 14

16 where Insured ij is the percent of household member-months insured, w S is seizable assets, X ij is a vector of household and state characteristics, and ɛ ij is the error term. 24,25 The crowd-out prediction is that the coefficient on seizable assets is greater than zero (α w > 0). 4.2 Costs Equation Figure 2, also discussed in the Introduction, showed that out-of-pocket payments by uninsured households are capped on average at $5,000. Figure 4 examines this effect more closely, plotting out-of-pocket payments against charges for uninsured households with low (< $10,000), moderate ($10,000 to $49,999), and high ( $50,000) levels of seizable assets. For small charges the three groups make similar out-of-pocket payments, consistent with most households being below the cap. For large charges, out-of-pocket payments sharply diverge. While households with less than $10,000 in seizable assets have their out-of-pocket payments capped, households with more than $50,000 in seizable assets see their out-of-pocket payments continue to scale up with charges, consistent with a cap that is increasing in seizable assets. To test the capping-of-cost prediction more rigorously, I estimate regression models of out-ofpocket payments on seizable assets, conditioning on the level of medical care received. Controlling for medical utilization is important because the sign of the unconditional effect of seizable assets on out-of-pocket payments is theoretically ambiguous. To see this, consider the effect of reducing a household s level of seizable assets. Due to the mechanical effect of the implicit insurance from bankruptcy, out-of-pocket payments should decrease. On the other hand, due to moral hazard, households may increase their medical utilization, raising out-of-pocket costs and potentially offsetting the mechanical effect in the opposite direction. For the analysis, I restrict the sample to uninsured households with positive medical utilization. Letting i denote households and j denote states, the second stage cost equation takes the 24 Using probit or logit functional forms for this equation does not have noticeable effects on the findings. 25 The log function form is a convenient way to deal with the long tail of seizable assets in the data. In the preferred specification, I bottom-code seizable asset at the filing cost of $2,000 and include an indicator for bottom-coding as a control. This prevents small fluctuations in seizable assets above zero, due to, for instance, whether a household recently deposed a paycheck in their checking account, from driving the results. The qualitative findings are robust to bottom-coding at 1 and to a linear functional form. 15

17 form ln(oop ij + 1) = β w ln(w S ij ) + f (RRS i; β RRS ) + X ij β X + ν ij, (4) where the dependent variable is log out-of-pocket payments, wij S is seizable assets, f (RRS i; β k m) is a fourth-order polynomial in the Relative Risk Score, X ij is a vector of household and state characteristics, and ν ij is the error term. 26 The capping of cost prediction is supported by a positive coefficient on seizable assets (β w > 0). 4.3 Cross-State Variation Consistently estimating the parameters of interest poses four distinct identification problems. The first issue is omitted variables: that coverage or costs and seizable assets may be jointly determined by unobserved factors. For instance, in the coverage equation, unobserved risk preferences could generate positive bias if more risk adverse households are more likely to accumulate precautionary savings and purchase insurance. Unobserved health shocks could generate negative bias by depleting assets and increasing preferences for coverage. The second concern is reverse causality: that households that choose bankruptcy insurance might strategically reduce their seizable assets to lessen their financial losses in the event of a bankruptcy filing. The third concern is measurement error: that because the measurement of assets is notoriously difficult, the coefficient on seizable assets might be attenuated towards zero. The fourth concern is endogenous asset exemption laws: that the state-level laws that specify the type and level of assets that can be seized in bankruptcy may be correlated with unobserved state-level factors. For instance, in the coverage equations one might be worried that a highprofile incident of medical bankruptcy in a state both increased insurance take-up and provided a legislative impulse for larger asset exemptions, biasing the estimates towards zero. I address the first three issues by constructing a simulated instrument that isolates variation in seizable assets solely due to cross-state differences in asset exemption law. (I discuss the fourth concern below.) The instrument is analogous to the Currie and Gruber (1996) instrument for Medi- 26 The depend variable is rarely zero. In the sample analyzed, less than 4 percent of households make zero out-ofpocket payments. 16

18 caid eligibility. In that paper, they construct their instrument by taking a nationally representative sample of individuals and running them through the eligibility laws of each state. They think of this instrument as a convenient parameterization of the legislative differences across states, purged of any contamination from the actual characteristics of each state s residents. In this context, I construct a simulated instrument by taking a constant, nationally representative sample of households (I use the entire sample) and running them through the asset exemption laws of each state. The baseline instrument for state j is given by: Baseline_Instrument j = 1 I ln(w S (w k, e j )), (5) k I where I is the entire set of households in the data. The first stage equation for household i that actually resides in state j is therefore: ln(w S ij ) = γ IVBaseline_Instrument j + X ij γ X + µ ij (6) Figure 5 plots the baseline instrument in each state. For the constant, nationally representative sample of households, there is an almost 2 log point difference in seizable assets across states. Even excluding the extremes, there is more than a log point difference. It is well known that instrumental variables estimates are identified by the response of households local to the instrument (Imbens and Angrist, 1994; Heckman and Vytlacil, 1998). Figure 6 examines these households by plotting the 20th through 50th percentiles of log seizable assets by state for the constant, nationally representative sample. The figure reveals two things. First, even at the 30th percentile of seizable assets there is substantial variation in log seizable assets across states. In creditor-friendly states such as Delaware, Michigan, and South Carolina seizable assets are a log point higher than in debtor-friendly states such as Rhode Island, Minnesota, and Texas. Second, the figure shows that the difference in log seizable assets between states is fairly constant across much of the relevant range of the distribution. Households in Kansas, to give a concrete example, have approximately 1.5 log points more seizable assets than households in Nebraska in the 30th, 40th, and 50th percentiles of the seizable asset distribution. This means that the simulated instrument is capturing variation across a substantial range of seizable assets levels, reducing con- 17

19 cerns that the instrumental variables estimate is local to households with particularly high or low levels of wealth. 4.4 Historical Homestead Exemptions I use three strategies to to address the fourth concern that asset exemption laws may be correlated with unobserved state-level determinants of insurance coverage. My main strategy is to construct an instrument that isolates variation solely due to 1920 homestead exemptions. By using homestead exemptions from before the era of widespread health insurance, this strategy eliminates potential bias from factors that might have simultaneously caused changes in asset exemptions and out-of-pocket costs or coverage over the course of the twentieth century. Moreover, historical evidence shows that 1920 homestead exemption levels resulted from an idiosyncratic array of nineteenth century historical circumstances. Describing the key factors driving the establishment of homestead exemptions in the nineteenth century, Goodman (1993) cites no less diverse a list than Texas colonizers and western developers, labor and land reformers, antimonopoly Jacksonian egalitarians, defenders of family security and women s property rights, southern planters and yeomen devastated by the Civil War. These heterogenous causes reduce the concern that historical homestead exemptions merely proxy for a persistent state-level characteristic such as the strength of the pro-debtor political movement. Importantly, historical homestead exemptions are also a good predictor of contemporaneous exemptions values. 27 Figure 7 shows this graphically, plotting the average level of seizable home equity for a constant, nationally representative sample of households under 2005 homestead exemptions (y-axis) and inflation-adjusted 1920 homestead exemptions (x-axis) in each state. The plot also shows the fitted line from a bivariate regression. As the slope coefficient indicates, homestead exemptions have become less generous over time, with seizable assets increasing on average by 90 percent. The R-squared value is 0.43, with the New England states in the lower right corner being the most prominent outliers. 28 I take two further approaches to reduce the concern that unobservable factors are driving the 27 Many of the changes since 1920 have simply been inflation updates passed by individual state legislatures (Skeel, 2001). 28 A keyword search of newspaper articles in a six-month window around major changes in Massachusetts and Connecticut assets exemptions failed to reveal any information on the reasons for these increases. 18

20 effect. The first is to sequentially add controls for Census Regions (e.g., Northeast) and Census Divisions (e.g., New England) to the main specification. Stable results across these specifications should address the concern that the effects are being driven by a spatially-correlated, unobserved factor. The second is to control for a rich set of state-level legislative covariates. In the coverage equations, I control for insurance market regulations (e.g., community rating requirements, coverage mandates) that may affect premiums. 29 While the publicly insured are excluded from the baseline sample, correlation between asset exemption laws and eligibility thresholds for public insurance programs might bias the estimates though sample selection. To assuage this concern, I estimate the regression models on samples excluding and including the publicly insured. I also control for the presence and generosity of Medicaid Medically Needy programs that provide an alternative form of safety net coverage. 30 In the cost equations, I control for hospital characteristics and other state-level factors (e.g., share of private hospitals) that may affect out-of-pocket payments The Effect on Insurance Coverage 5.1 First Stage Estimates Table 2 shows implied first stage regressions of log seizable assets on different instrumental variables. Column 1 shows estimates with the baseline instrument. Columns 2 and 3 show estimates with instruments that isolate the variation due to seizable homestead equity and seizable nonhomestead assets. These instruments are calculated by taking a constant, nationally representative of households and calculating their level of seizable homestead and non-homestead equity as though they lived in each state. Column 4 shows estimates using the instrument that isolates variation due to 1920 homestead exemptions. All the specifications include demographic controls (age group, family structure, race, education, and income), state controls (mean income, percent 29 The data on these regulations was taken from a Blue Cross Blue Shield (2002) compilation gracious shared by Amanda Kowalski. 30 I thank Jay Bhattacharya for alternating me to the presence of these programs. I use 2003 data on these programs taken from Crowley (2003). 31 In particular, I control for the share of private and nonprofit hospitals, taken from the Hospital Statistics 2005 published by the American Hospital Association. I control for Disproportionate Share Hospital payments per 1,000 residents taken from the Kaiser Family Foundation. I control for the number of Federally Qualified Health Centers per 100,000 residents. 19

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